Childhood
The speaker describes his childhood as a time of deep connection to the natural world. In this state, the younger speaker is generally happy, often deliriously so. He remains free from the shackles of urban, adult society, and therefore is more in touch with underlying truths. Through these descriptions, Wordsworth embraces a prototypically Romantic ideal of childhood as a distinct period of authenticity and innocence. This contrasts with a type of childhood that he increasingly notices and condemns—overeducated, constrained, and cut off from nature. Elsewhere in the Prelude, he describes other children in the same terms, often identifying them as victims of a lost innocence.
Childhood is such a distinct and elusive period that, in recalling his own, the speaker almost feels as if he's describing another person rather than a version of himself. At the same time, the speaker's childhood self is undeniably an essential part of the artist he'll one day become. After all, the entire point of the "Prelude" is to recount the speaker's artistic development, starting with his childhood; the poem is premised on the idea that every phase of a poet's life will one day infuse their work. The periods of his adult life when he feels the most authentic and intelligent are also the ones where he feels most connected to his childhood self.
The Limits of Empiricism and Reason
The speaker of the "Prelude" condemns the arrogance of scientists who believe that Enlightenment-era empiricism can singlehandedly solve the world's problems and clarify its mysteries. Instead, he repeatedly emphasizes the inevitability of uncertainty and the importance of subjectivity. He stresses that his own goal—that of narrating his life from childhood through adulthood—involves dealing with messy, ambiguous processes and accepting their complexities. He contrasts this openness to ambiguity with an empiricism-driven desire to pin down and name every element of reality. Indeed, he contends that desire is in some ways the opposite of an empirical fact. Rather than simply observing the world as it is, in all of its complexity, human desire reshapes the world according to the limits of human perception. It is, the speaker suggests, better to acknowledge one's own biases and internal experiences, valuing them rather than striving to ignore them. This outlook is cemented after the speaker goes through a youthful period of infatuation with reason and empiricism. He realizes that this attachment to reason is misguided and actually keeps the truth at arm's reach, and thus he chooses to prioritize feeling over empiricism in his own outlook.
This skepticism shows most clearly when the speaker undergoes a personal and philosophical crisis in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Confronting the failures of his beloved cause, he veers hard away from moral passion, choosing instead to immerse himself in a rationalistic worldview and to seek proof everywhere he turns. This rationalistic worldview is, for him, mostly defensive—a way to steel himself against further disappointment rather than a way to actually create a better society. It is also wildly unproductive. The drive to seek evidence and proof in all things, rather than to trust his own instincts or to embrace the mysterious or unpredictable, never actually seems to move the speaker closer to the truth. In the end, the speaker finds passion without reason to be dangerous and incomplete. But he finds reason without passion to be self-defeating, inauthentic, and deadening.
Education
The speaker has high expectations for his time as a student at Cambridge. After all, he's naturally inquisitive, social, and adventurous, and he assumes that university will be the perfect place for someone like him. But, while he has a good time relaxing and partying with his college friends, he finds the experience disappointing overall. The culture of the institution seems to him to revolve around luxury and status rather than a pursuit of knowledge. Even the scholars who are supposed to teach him appear to be consumed by their own petty dramas.
The speaker's irritation with Cambridge isn't merely about his personal desires. Instead, it fits into a broader concern about the role of educational institutions, and institutions in general, in modernity. He negatively compares modern Cambridge with the universities and monasteries of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Then, he notes, scholars used to immerse themselves so completely in their work that they gave up all material comforts. Some, he points out, even had to beg for money in order to live while they pursued knowledge. This single-minded devotion to learning has given way, at Cambridge, to a kind of vacation spot for young men. The speaker's longing for days when people made dramatic sacrifices for knowledge fits into a broader affinity for passion, devotion, and iconoclasm.
That being said, the speaker is also unenthusiastic, as noted above, about education that values empiricism and overly clear answers. A true education should be individual, valuing experiential learning and subjectivity. Perhaps above all, he suggests, a real education involves seeking insight while maintaining humility in the face of nature's mysteries.
Nostalgia
The Prelude as a whole is in some ways an exercise in nostalgia. Its speaker operates on the premise that the past can be best understood from a distance, through the film of intervening years—despite the strange and uneasy incongruities that can arise when narrating from a great chronological distance. When describing moments of carefree ease from his early childhood, the speaker often comments in a melancholy, longing way about the way the world has since changed. In doing so, he simultaneously sheds light on the meaningfulness of those early moments and overrides some of the vividness of those more immediate, child-centric descriptions. In other words, nostalgia here both illuminates and obscures. A particularly clear instance of this dual role appears in Book Fourth, when the speaker makes his first return home from Cambridge. Re-encountering his own foster mother, former classmates, and even a much-loved dog, the speaker has both gained a new appreciation for them and feels a new gap between them and himself. Later, when the disillusioned speaker remembers his early idealism about the French Revolution, he feels simultaneously happy and horrified with his old self. Nostalgia, in other words, creates a paradoxical blend of remoteness and closeness.
Mortality and Ephemerality
The narrative structure of the Prelude is in itself an acknowledgment of the impermanence of humanity. The speaker, recalling his childhood from a later vantage point, carefully notes the imperfection of memory as well as the impossibility of returning to the past. Change is constant, in other words, and even an individual person is always in flux, losing bits of his own past self. Addressing this on a wider scale, the speaker shares his despairing knowledge that mankind's greatest achievements (namely, great literature) won't last forever. His awareness of this ephemerality is sharpened by a juxtaposition with nature. Nature, he notes, is eternal. Beside it, the greatest works of literature are fleeting. This focus on change and impermanence also crops up in descriptions of beloved or admired people who have died, ranging from the speaker's mother to great writers like Milton to the Maid of Buttermere. On the other hand, the speaker's belief in certain unbending principles and paths towards progress helps him see some deaths—like those of people fighting for justice in France—as acts of martyrdom that retain meaning throughout history. At his most optimistic, he even dares to hope that his own work, by playing a role in and describing the eternity of nature, can be eternal in a sense.
Revolution and Radical Politics
After leaving Cambridge, the speaker embarks on a journey to the Alps, which involves traveling through France during the early days of the French Revolution. On the one hand, he feels rather distant from the political issues facing France, appreciating them as a faraway observer. The speaker is idealistic, but more engaged with concrete everyday reality than with abstractions like liberty or equality. At the same time, he speaks glowingly of the atmosphere in France, saying that the Revolution has created an overwhelming atmosphere of joy and freedom. However, Wordsworth's 1850 revision contains newly skeptical passages reacting to the later, more violent years of the French Revolution, reflecting the poet's own growing skepticism of radical politics as he aged. Similarly, while the 1805 version of Book Seventh does not allude to the conservative politician Edmund Burke, the 1850 edition speaks of him with some admiration, again reflecting a newly conservative strain in the poet's work.
This ambivalence comes through even more prominently in Books Ninth and Tenth, which cover the speaker's time in France. He continues to support the revolution, befriending a like-minded army officer who seems to embody all the best aspects of France's new political idealism. Yet a sense of unease grows as Wordsworth begins to heavily foreshadow the ways in which the Revolution will fail to live up to its promise, and then as he learns about the Reign of Terror. He feels no less inspired by the ideals of the Revolution, but is dismayed by how easily those ideals have been co-opted for the sake of power grabs and petty political triumphs.
Print and Orality
When living in London, the speaker is met with a new, overwhelming rush of words in two forms: oral and written. Of course, he's already encountered the spoken word in conversation and the written word in the books he loves. But in London, these sources of verbal information are constant. He hears oral performances from stage actors, street performers, and vendors. He walks past ballad broadsheets and other written ephemera posted on walls, or identifies buildings by their written signage. In the late eighteenth century, London was known for its "cries"—the oral calls of sellers on the street. These voices had begun to intermingle with written ones as Britain became an increasingly print-oriented society. The speaker experiences both aspects of the changing city, and finds them both exhilarating and exhausting. Above all, he finds these urban, literate modes of communication to be shockingly anonymous—they offer one-way communication between strangers, exemplifying the strangeness of city life generally. On the other hand, when recounting the emotional story of Vaudracour and Julia, the speaker bolsters and intensifies his tale by claiming to have heard it first from oral sources: orality offers legitimacy when referenced in a written poem.
Imagination
For Wordsworth, subjectivity is a powerful force. The world—or at least, the human world—revolves not around some objective reality but around the impulses of the imagination. The speaker repeatedly expresses gratitude that, because he was raised in an uncorrupted natural landscape, his internal life is strong and incorruptible. He retains his imagination as a defensive force of sorts, one that can never be truly demolished. To Wordsworth, imagination does not obscure truth. Instead, it works as a system to organize and clarify reality, turning what seems like nonsense into pleasing or truthful information. Through his imagination and the power of his subjectivity, as given to him by nature itself, the speaker is able to productively understand even that which he dislikes or that which he finds to be distanced from nature's truths. However, as much as subjectivity becomes a way to filter and understand the world, it is also subject to intrusions from outside society—the speaker's dreams, his most private and subjective realm, are at one point overtaken by thoughts about political injustice and violence. The line between the imagined and the real, or the internal and the external, is blurry—sometimes delightfully and at other times disturbingly.
Individualism
One type of figure receives consistent focus and praise in the Prelude: the passionate, iconoclastic free thinker. The speaker himself identifies as such. He frequently departs from the crowd (literally or metaphorically), choosing instead to observe at a distance and often feeling critical or skeptical about the norms of the society around him, whether at university or in London. He also constructs his listener, Coleridge, as an iconoclast—Coleridge, he suggests, has had to fight and rebel against the surrounding world in order to surround himself with art, nature, and beauty. In the chapters about the French Revolution, this theme takes on a political cast. Wordsworth writes of his admiration for Beaupuis, the army officer who goes against the norms of his peers and social stratum in order to embrace the Revolution. He speaks sympathetically, too, about Vaudracour and Julia—young people he has heard about secondhand, who have suffered for refusing to conform to the norms of French society. Not all of the speaker's admiration is reserved for individualistic rebels. He speaks highly of the woman who raised him, recalling her humble generosity and quiet, dutiful manner. Generally, though, the Prelude saves its highest regard for those who follow principles rather than social norms or status.
Power
The Prelude reserves its harshest judgment for people who are power-hungry or who use power and status to oppress, harm, and belittle others. The embodiment of this is, for the speaker, the radical French Revolutionary leader Maximilien Robespierre. Not only are Robespierre and his ilk cruel, the speaker asserts—they are also fighting a futile battle, since the only real and lasting power comes from God and nature. Power for individuals, the speaker believes, can only be earned by aligning oneself with the natural world and progress through creating art or advocating for others. Individuality, Wordsworth hints, should be used in service of nature rather than to gain power over it. While the poem is critical of those who seek power for its own sake, it expresses love and respect for the power of the natural world, which is portrayed as free of ego or self-aggrandizement.
Idolatry and God
One of Wordsworth's most stinging critiques of both oppressive politics and rationalism is that they create authority figures and even gods out of undeserving individuals. He writes that certain revolutionaries, considering "human understanding paramount," have "made of that their God," and deplores that "the senseless sword / Was prayed to." Later, he compares his own embrace of rationalism to a kind of idol-worship, which elevates self-regard above truth. It is in his political writing that Wordsworth takes the strongest stance against this kind of idol-worship, but he also critiques it on a broader social level. In a telling use of the word "worship," for instance, he writes that far too many contemporary children are taught "to worship seemliness." By specifically noting that certain values or people are treated as gods, Wordsworth goes beyond merely arguing that they are too powerful or popular. Instead, he laments that they have supplanted more important objects of worship—namely, the speaker's beloved natural world and the divine forces associated with it.
Utopia
One of the fundamental tensions of the Prelude is the speaker's simultaneous love for the world as it already is and his desire to create a utopia. He envisions a perfectly just world, in which nature is able to provide without being stymied by human hierarchy or cruelty. In the world as it is, the fact that people go hungry or that governments are self-serving is unnatural—literally against nature. Thus, the speaker's envisioned utopia is a way for the world to meet its full potential. However, some utopian visions can go terribly wrong. In the case of the Reign of Terror, a utopia goes wrong when its advocates try to mimic the cruelty and injustice to which they are accustomed. In the case of rationalism, utopia goes wrong because it relies on an idealized, fictionalized notion of human perfection that defies nature instead of following its lead. The most realistic prospects for the betterment of society, the speaker seems to conclude, must come from a place of moderation mixed with passion.
Gender
Wordsworth occasionally makes reference to women, or at least certain virtuous women, as embodiments of the traits that the speaker values and fights to retain in his own development. The speaker recalls knowing a girl who, in part because of her gender, was able to feel gratitude for the simple pleasures of her everyday life—even when the speaker fought the instinct to judge and dismiss similar pleasures. Another idealized, virtuous woman comes in the form of the speaker's own caretaker, who lives a pared-down but helpful life of religious faith and communal involvement. The Maid of Buttermere, a real woman who is the subject of a play that the speaker sees, is in fact so innocent and trusting that she is essentially martyred as a result. At the same time, women who deviate from these characteristics, such as a promiscuous woman whom the speaker sees at a London theater, are the subject of fairly harsh condemnation. For the speaker, veering between virtues and flaws is inevitable and is a source of valuable development. For the women he describes, however, a slightly less complicated picture emerges: they tend to either be wholly good or degraded.
Poetry
Early in the Prelude, the speaker faces a crisis as he compares two of his passions: poetry and nature. Nature seems eternal and unending, but compared to it, the work of poets is fleeting. The speaker feels panicky as he realizes that mankind's most meaningful work is ultimately ephemeral. But later, as his literary identity becomes clearer to him, the speaker concludes that poets should be aligned with nature rather than simply compared to it. In his more mature state, he views poetry as a tool used to celebrate, share, and preserve the natural world. In this way, he hopes, his work can actually come to play a role in eternity, transcending the seemingly mundane circumstances of its production. By the final book of the Prelude, the speaker suggests that poetry can express eternal, universal ideas through the more modest aim of inspiring individual readers: by engaging with a more specific, interpersonal variety of love, it can play a role in disseminating the more intellectual, philosophical love of the natural world.
